REMEMBER! Any time you do work that might disturb or interfere with native animals and vegetation, particularly threatened species, you need to check with the state authorities to see if you need any approvals, such as scientific licences or animal ethics committee permits.

You can monitor Feral Horses to better understand:

• Where they do and don’t live
• How many live on Country
• How well management of Country and Feral Horses is working

By using one or more the following methods, you can better understand Feral Horses on your Country. If you monitor the same place at the same time every year, you can see if there are changes to Feral Horses on Country.

Camera Traps

Camera traps can be used to monitor Feral Horses and other species that live in the same area(s). They can be set to automatically take photos or videos when an animal passes the camera. You can make your monitoring more efficient and cost effective by monitoring multiple species (including native and introduced species) with the same method.

What can you learn?

Where Feral Horses live:

• Occupancy - the proportion of sites occupied by a species.
• Changes over time – are species being detected at the same sites every year, or are they disappearing from some and/or appearing at other sites?
• Habitat preferences – does the species only occur in particular habitats?

Detection frequency – how often are they being detected in an area?

Behaviour – what they are doing in the photos?

Activity – You can know when they are active, and when they pass through areas.

You can collect data from seeing Feral Horses – from an image, you might be able to identify their age, sex, group size, health (skinny or fat) etc.

Using it the Right-way

• Use this method in areas suitable for camera trapping i.e. open enough to take photos or along trails, good access.
• Avoid putting cameras in areas prone to flooding or become seasonally inaccessible, or make sure you bring in cameras before it becomes inaccessible.
• Feral Horses are generally diurnal
• If there is an obvious path or area that Feral Horses use, you can set up cameras to face this path. Angle the camera down the path, so that you increase the amount of time the camera has to take pictures as Feral Horses pass by.
• Feral Horses have a large body, so should easily trigger the camera sensors. If they are close to the camera, or the camera is low to the ground, you might only see the legs
• Place cameras 1 km apart. Feral horses have large home ranges, so you want to cover as much area as possible/reasonable

You can learn more about camera traps on the “How we check on things” page and in the Environmental Monitoring Method Landscape Scale Camera Trap Monitoring.

Aerial Surveys 

In development.